Semiotic Work Research Articles

Identity in university students: The semiotic work of making sense of yourself

The development of a deepened sense of self in young adults is a complex process. In this paper, we report on an interdisciplinary research project on identity formation among students at the University of the Free State from the perspective of semiotic work. Based on work in psychology and semiotics, we interviewed fifty-seven students about their identity. In particular, we asked students to bring along ‘something’ that they thought represents their identity, and we asked them to explain their choice. We first performed a semiotic analysis on the representations the students brought and then coded their motivations for themes. We found identity formation along the lines suggested by existing literature, with themes related to the importance of finding both an authentic and relational sense of self in a growth process that contains elements of hardship and strength. The study did, however, find two points of interests, namely the fact that very few students brought a material representation with them as well as the fact that students oscillated between resilience and succumbing to pressure.

SAM: A Language for Education

In this article I present a sociological language—social activity method (SAM)—and illustrate how it’s development and deployment has educational potential. I draw on my experience with postgraduate students and also engage with extant work in anthropology, sociology, and social semiotics, though the principal concerns of the essay are conceptual. I present three ‘relational spaces’, of which two are seeing their first published outing in this paper1.

Examining Visual Metadiscourse in EFL Students’ Infographics

As multimodal texts become ubiquitous in the digital age, analyzing how writers interact with readers via visuals is becoming increasingly important. Enlightened by Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2001) semiotic work, D’Angelo (2010) extended Hyland’s (2000) text-based metadiscourse model and proposed a new framework for analyzing the visual metadiscourse of multimodal texts. We used D’Angelo’s (2016) visual metadiscourse framework to evaluate the comprehensibility and organization of the EFL students’ infographics in this study. Two research questions guided our inquiry: (1) How do EFL students use diverse visual metadiscourse resources in their infographic posters? (2) In what ways, if any, does the use of visual interactive resources relate to the assessed quality of the infographics? We collected a total of 122 infographic posters and coded 5 categories of interactive resources for each poster (i.e., information value, framing, connective elements, graphic elements, and fonts), and then carried out frequency counts for each category and subcategories, taking all the posters into account. Moreover, we graded the EFL students’ infographics according to a multi-traits grading rubric, and then conducted multiple regression analyses of their use of visual interactive resources and the scores for their infographics in the aspect of visual effects. The results show that the students used diverse visual interactive resources to guide their audience through the text. The assessed quality of the infographics was found to be significantly correlated with the use of graphic elements and fonts. This study sheds new light on digital multimodal pedagogy, particularly on the role of visual metadiscourse in teaching and assessing multimodal texts in language/writing classrooms.

Specters of excess: Passing and policing in the Malay‐speaking archipelago

AbstractPositioned at the island interface of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, the east Malaysian state of Sabah bears witness to some of the largest clandestine cross‐border flows across the globe. This article examines what a Royal Commission of Inquiry on Illegal Immigrants in Sabah has called “an insidious problem which has turned out to be an all‐consuming nightmare.” It highlights the situated (meta)semiotic work involved in determining and enforcing the state's seemingly indeterminate and unenforceable borders between citizens and suspected non‐citizens, while also showing how inquiries into migrant illegality are ultimately inquiries into “excess.” It demonstrates how experiences of and orientations to excess take expressive shape in migrants and Malaysians' fashions of speaking and forms of life. It concludes by considering how these transnational dynamics across a sprawling archipelagic region lend a provincializing angle of vision on American(ist) anthropology's own hemispheric parochialism.

The meaning-making in kindergarten children’s visual narrative compositions

During a 10-week classroom-based study in a school in western Canada, 17 Kindergarten children had multiple opportunities to learn about how elements of visual art, design and layout in picturebook artwork are fundamental to meaning-making when transacting with this format of literature. Student application of learning about the concepts under study was explored when the children viewed and discussed wordless or almost wordless picturebooks, and when they created their own artwork or visual compositions. Findings from the content analysis of the Kindergarten children’s visual narrative compositions and individual interviews revealed their understanding of how colour, point of view, framing, line to show action, line to show emotion and implied line can be used purposefully by sign-makers to represent particular meanings. Furthermore, application of Halliday’s metafunctions conceptual framework to analyze three focus students’ visual narrative compositions revealed how their semiotic work concomitantly realized the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. Consistent with the tenets of social semiotics and sociocultural theory, the descriptions of the instructional procedures and student activities convey how the practices in the classroom shaped the students’ visual narrative compositions. The findings enrich understanding of how young children’s knowledge of various semiotic resources can enhance their understanding and interpretations of the kinds of communicative functions realized or fulfilled by various meaning-making resources, and can inform the design of their visual compositions.

Introducing Paul Cobley: a graphic guide

Abstract Within the discipline of semiotics, written text remains the primary mode of communication and analysis, despite the fact that, as all good semioticians know, signs occur in all modalities – which is why we think of artists and musicians, no less than novelists and poets, as applied semioticians par excellence. In 1997, Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz combined the semiotic tools of words and drawings to produce what is undoubtedly one of the most successful and influential texts for the dissemination of semiotic theory: the illustrated graphic guide called Semiotics for beginners (later published as Introducing semiotics). On the occasion of this well-deserved festschrift honoring Paul’s life of work in semiotics, the authors felt it most appropriate to pay homage to Paul – and to the graphic guide with which he has inspired countless readers across the world to better understand the fundamentals of semiotics – by once again combining the semiotic tools of words and drawings to illustrate the ideas and history of this master semiotician.

Reviewing the Multifaceted Complexity and Potential of Wordless Picturebooks

The nature of wordless and almost wordless picturebooks requires heightened engagement in sophisticated visual semiotic work by readers. Subjects addressed in this review of the literature include delimiting the format of wordless picturebooks, considering the multifaceted demands of wordless picturebooks on readers, and examining research findings on student transactions with and adult mediation of wordless picturebooks.

Chronotopes and commodification on the Streets of St. Charles

New residential and commercial developments provide opportunities for ideological and semiotic work to be performed in the course of naming the development itself and streets, buildings etc. within it. This paper examines the names given within one such development in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, USA. I offer a framework to examine the semiotic work names such as these do, in which I consider place names to evoke chronotopes in order to construct a place as authentic. Relying on this constructed authenticity in selling space and the use of space within the development means that place names and the chronotopes evoked by them carry symbolic onomastic capital and are effectively commodified.

The online activism of mock translanguaging: Language style, celebrity persona, and social class in China

This paper examines a viral language style that emerged during online activism against a Chinese celebrity after she was announced the winner of an architecture award. Drawing upon insights from celebrity studies, online activism, and social semiotics, I examine how netizens creatively appropriate and mock celebrity language, focusing on the semiotic work netizens engage in to mobilize emotions, form solidarity networks, and perform collective action as they reveal the moral failures, injustice, and falsehood of celebrity culture. Three semiotic strategies are found to be key in enabling netizens to formulate their critique: entextualization, stylization, and typification. In this process, language serves multiple functions: it is the target of critique, a proxy for discussing social issues, a tool for building solidarity through mutual learning, and a creative way of pursuing fun. I argue that these semiotic moves turn language into power, allowing netizens to articulate discontent against the rich amid increasing disparity and lack of trust in a neoliberal society.

Interaction history as a source of compositionality in emergent communication

Abstract In this paper, we explore interaction history as a particular source of pressure for achieving emergent compositional communication in multi-agent systems. We propose a training regime implementing template transfer, the idea of carrying over learned biases across contexts. In the presented method, a sender-receiver dyad is first trained with a disentangled pair of objectives, and then the receiver is transferred to train a new sender with a standard objective. Unlike other methods (e.g. the obverter algorithm), the template transfer approach does not require imposing inductive biases on the architecture of the agents. We experimentally show the emergence of compositional communication using topographical similarity, zero-shot generalization and context-independence as evaluation metrics. The presented approach is connected to an important line of work in semiotics and developmental psycholinguistics: it supports a conjecture that compositional communication is scaffolded on simpler communication protocols.

Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Semiotic Doctrine of the Church: A Peircean Corrective

Abstract This paper aims to explore and critique Wolfhart Pannenberg’s use of semiotic concepts in his understanding and explanation of the church. He defines the church as “the fellowship of individual believers,” and a “sign of the future fellowship of humanity under God’s reign,” i. e. the future Kingdom of God. As he continues to articulate his doctrine of the church, Pannenberg employs semiotic concepts to articulate this notion of the church as a sign of the Kingdom of God. In this paper, I aim to explore Pannenberg’s use of semiotic concepts as they concern his understanding of the church and provide critique and a new way forward of understanding the church as a sign of the Kingdom of God. Though Pannenberg is right to employ semiotic concepts and terminology to expound upon and clarify this concept, he is wrong in the semiotic model of the sign and approach he chooses to employ. In what follows, I first summarize and explicate Pannenberg’s semiotic understanding of the church, and then I provide a critique and corrective of his semiotic preferences with the semiotic work of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

The designing of ocean threat comics by elementary students

Abstract A paucity of research has been conducted with learners in elementary classrooms on both the use of and the student creation of science comics. During the classroom-based research featured in this article, Grade 4 students designed ocean threat comics for the culminating activity of an interdisciplinary Ocean Literacy unit, one component of a larger study. Throughout the research, the students were afforded with opportunities to develop their visual meaning-making skills and competences, as well as their aesthetic understanding of and critical thinking about multimodal ensembles through participation in activities that focused on various elements of visual art and design, and conventions of the medium of comics. The visual and descriptive analysis of one student’s ocean threat comics, which includes excerpts from the interview about her work, reveals her motivations for selecting and orchestrating specific semiotic resources to represent and express particular meanings that realized her objectives as a sign-maker. Overall, the descriptions of the pedagogy featured during the research and the student’s ocean threat comics demonstrate how the development of student knowledge about elements of visual art and design, and conventions of the medium of comics can inform and deepen students’ semiotic work of comprehending, interpreting and designing science comics.

Transformational influence of the foundations of social semiotics on approaches to language teaching

The authors analyzed the standpoints of foreign scholars concerning the contribution of students’ semiotic work into the educational process, determined the peculiarities of perception of authentic and educational texts as social communication acts and established the ways of revising the approaches to the formation of a language individual. The students’ awareness about the For this reason, text analysis and other types of text activities (transformation, collapsing and expanding) are extensively used in the process of teaching Ukrainian and foreign languages. The authors established that integration of foundations of social semiotics into the process of teaching languages should envisage the transformation of the principles of language teaching methodology, altering approaches to teaching thereof, designing new programs and criteria for selecting teaching resources.

Rats, Mice and Humans

Abstract This paper will introduce the results of a study conducted in 2019 about how humans perceive species they have to live with, despite not wanting to do so—liminal species—, specifically rats and mice. The results presented here are part of a wider study about rats and mice in cities, their relationship with humans, the nuisances they generate as well as the various and important roles they play in the urban ecosystem, introduced at the Gatherings in BIosemiotics 2020. The study originally focused solely on rats, which are in a difficult societal context in France, especially in Paris: due to heat waves, planned works and floods, rats are becoming more and more present on the surface, instead of being invisible underground as they used to be. However, some of the results suggest that a significant number of participants are not completely positive about being able to distinguish between a rat and a mouse. In order to present a more precise and detailed overview, it was decided to study the difference not only between the cohabitation issues humans may have with actual rats and/or mice, but also between the semiotic relationships that humans have with the symbolic rat and symbolic mouse. As such, this paper will present the results for both species, with their similarities and divergences. It shows that a significant part of nuisances and cohabitation issues are more “believed” than factual. The paper focuses on how the cultural and emotional backgrounds of participants influence their semiotic relationship with these species, and how the perceived nuisances, threats or issues can vary according to these parameters. This study aims to develop a better understanding of the different elements that play a part in issues of cohabitation between humans—especially urban humans—and liminal species—especially rodents. It will show how some of the nuisances can be addressed, not by coercive methods on the actual animals, such as extermination, repellents or removal, but through semiotic work and education on the symbolic animal, its related myths, superstitions, fears and phobias.

Traditional Knowledge, science and China's pride: how a TCM social media account legitimizes TCM treatment of Covid-19

ABSTRACT The legitimation of Chinese medicine has long been a politically and morally charged subject in China since the early twentieth century. In recent years, there is an apparent surge of enthusiasm in developing and promoting Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), as evidenced by the state's frequent lauding of its advantages and the implementation of a series of supportive policies and regulations. During the Covid-19 pandemic in China, TCM has again gained ample attention in major state-owned media outlets due to its proclaimed effects in treating Covid-19. In this article, I will conduct an interdisciplinary study of the semiotic work dedicated to legitimating TCM treatment of Covid-19 in the social media account of an official TCM institution. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and textual analysis supported by reference to history and anthropology of medicine, I will examine closely how the above-mentioned semiotic work is achieved through reference to a range of theoretical and moral arguments. Moreover, the paradoxes and inconsistencies in this process of semiotic construction will be discussed to shed light on the deeper issues concerning the entangled relationship of health science and politics in China, as well as the epistemological difficulties in promoting TCM inside and outside China.

The Origins Of Umberto Eco’s Semio-Philosophical Project

Umberto Eco’s semiotics, unlike that of most of his colleagues, has always claimed to be a philosophical research. For Eco, general semiotics, that is, the research on the functioning of signs, was a fundamental part of philosophy, because the knowledge of objects and the formulation of the ideas that characterize them takes place by means of signs. This paper shows how Eco’s semiotic work derives from his philosophical training and how interest in the mass media and political commitment have not changed the nature of his philosophical project. His research itinerary is compared with that of other semiotics scholars to show the originality of his approach.

Apport de l’épistémologie de René Thom à la sémiotique

La pensée épistémologique de René Thom montre deux facettes qui correspondent grossièrement à deux périodes de sa recherche scientifique : (a) un platonisme mathématique qui recherche le corrélat des structures topologiques dans la réalité des phénomènes (la période de 1965 à 1977), et (b) la critique du paradigme galiléen en physique expérimentale et la pertinence d’une philosophie de la nature appliquée à la biologie et à la sémiotique (la période de 1978 à 1990). Les deux positions peuvent être analysées d’une part en partant du livre Stabilité structurelle et morphogenèse de 1972 et de son programme d’une analyse qualitative basée sur la théorie des catastrophes (ensemble avec Christopher Zeeman), d’autre part basé sur le livre de 1988 avec la vision d’une sémiophysique et un programme qui se met à la recherche des forces qui sélectionnent et canalisent la morphogenèse du sens (et qui permettent de constituer une sémantique en linguistique et une sémiotique dynamique). L’épistémologie de Thom peut être interprétée dans le contexte de la tradition philosophique de Leibniz à Kant et Husserl. Jean Petitot explique les rapports tout en considérant la sémiotique de Greimas et les recherches cognitives en linguistique et en neuropsychologie. Ces aspects historiques sont discutés brièvement. Cet article essaie de clarifier et d’évaluer la portée épistémologique des travaux de Thom pour la sémiotique et la linguistique. Il poursuit le but non seulement de faire comprendre cette contribution au débat épistémologique, mais aussi de circonscrire le potentiel épistémologique de la pensée morphodynamique de René Thom pour la sémiotique et la linguistique.

Getting smart: towards critical digital literacy pedagogies

ABSTRACT Many researchers agree that awareness of agency and how it is enacted through different participants holds a key role in developing digital literacy. Recognition of the ways in which digital tools can appropriate and shape humans’ semiotic work and even act out roles in communication is part of critical digital literacy. In digital environments, humans interact with the content (not just consume it) through interfaces that may include touchscreen, voice commands, eye movement and hand gesture, often accompanied by non-human agents (e.g. bots). The need to make transparent the hidden design intentions of these non-human liaisons is becoming more and more essential, particularly for formal educational scenarios where digital tools are commonly used. This study explores how different roles of human and non-human agents in an online environment can be made salient and how teachers can promote learner awareness of hidden agents at the layer of digital interfaces. Drawing on the notion of “exchange structure” from conversational analysis and functional linguistics, audio recordings and re-constructed screenshots are analyzed. Results highlight the actions and intentionality of human and non-human agents that form multimodal turn-taking sequences. Suggestions for developing critical digital literacy pedagogies (CDLP), including making hidden agents more salient, are proposed.

Translating Time: Modelling the (Re)Processing of Emerging Meaning

The choice between substance ontology and process ontology has been haunting our thinking since, at least, Ancient Greek philosophy. The assumption seems that things are the way they are and that one has to put work into changing them. Constancy or substance, in this view, is primary and change (or process) secondary. In translation studies, this plays out in the source text as the stable starting point that has to be transformed into a target text. Based on Peirce’s process semiotics and other process thinkers, I inverse the above argument, arguing that change or process is primary and constancy or substance secondary. Because the universe is subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is a process taking form rather than a form changing. Any text is a process that has been constrained materially to be relatively stable, but the stability is not original; it is the effect of semiotic work, translation. My interest is in the semiotic work done to constrain the semiotic process into some form of stability and how one can get to know or understand these constraints. Part of this paper explores some of the implications of process thinking for translation studies. However, this reversal of ground and figure also challenges the modeling of translation. If translation is a process, how do we model it in a static medium such as print? Therefore, I explore the affordances that new computational technology offers for translating static models into dynamic ones.

Effects of Media Exposure on Regional Associations

AbstractAlthough there is a long-standing tradition discounting the effect of media exposure on language variation, this study shows how televised media formulate and reinforce the sociosemiotic links between linguistic features and their regional associations. The Mandarin aspect markeryouis an interesting case in this regard, as it is semiotically linked mostly, if not exclusively, to Taiwanese Mandarin by many Chinese mainlanders, even though the feature is, in fact, also observed in many southern Mandarin varieties on the mainland. Drawing upon Agha’s concept of enregisterment, the goals of this study are 1) to provide empirical evidence of the semiotic work that media do to language, and 2) to test whether exposure to Taiwanese televised media contributes to the mismatch between the regional association and actual geographical distribution of the aspect markeryou. The findings of this study suggest two levels of media influence: meta-awareness and indexicality. The relationships between these two levels are incremental and mutually constitutive, and televised media play the role of catalyzing these reciprocal processes.